PFF Scholar Gillian Goobie, MD: Zeroing in On Air Pollution
Gillian Goobie, MD
The PFF Scholars program supports early-career investigators with competitive two-year research grants. The goal is to prepare them to earn funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other prestigious funders in the future. PFF Scholars receive expert mentoring and, if approved, can use PFF Registry data for their research projects.
We checked in with current PFF Scholar Gillian Goobie, MD, for an update on her PFF-funded research, “Air Pollution: Clinical Outcomes and Epigenomic Effects in Interstitial Lung Diseases.” How does air pollution affect ILD? Dr. Goobie wants to understand how exposure to airborne pollutants over time affects clinical outcomes in patients with fibrotic ILD. To do this, she will integrate air-quality data from across the U.S. with data from the PFF Registry. Specifically, she will look at how Registry patients with ILD have done in terms of lung function decline, exacerbations, and mortality. Then, she will put that information in the context of annualized air pollution levels near their homes. Dr. Goobie originally planned to use ground-based data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). But then she found an even better source: a database of satellite readings from the Atmospheric Composition Group at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This downloadable dataset includes data from throughout North America from 2000-2018. “They measure aerosol optical depth to estimate particulate matter levels, then combine those readings with data from ground-based EPA stations to validate them,” she says. “This produces a highly
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accurate estimate of pollutants at the fairly precise location of one square kilometer.” Better insights about rural patients The Dalhousie data set does offer an important advantage: it offers more precise data for rural locations. That’s because satellite data can cover any place on earth, while the EPA’s ground-based data must rely on physical monitors to collect data. “There are often very few ground-based monitors in rural areas,” she says. “Satellite-based data are more likely to provide accurate exposure estimates for rural patients. We’re often making big assumptions about the exposures rural patients face because we just haven’t been able to collect good data.” Dr. Goobie intends to compare her results using both the Dalhousie and EPA data, a technique known as a sensitivity analysis. “If the results are the same using each dataset, that might tell us that either approach is valid to use in future research,” she says. “By using more than one method, that increases the confidence that any significant results are real.” Early data: more pollution, more deaths Dr. Goobie, who is currently pursuing a PhD in human genetics at the University of Pittsburgh, explained that it’s too soon to know what the results will achieve. Dr. Goobie performed some preliminary research while awaiting samples from the Registry data coordinating center at the Statistical Analysis of Biomedical and Educational Research Group (SABER) at the University of Michigan. She cross-referenced the air-quality data with clinical data from her patients in Pittsburgh. “Those data aren’t published, but we have evidence that higher pollutant exposure during disease appears to be associated with increased mortality in patients with ILD,” she says. This project is funded by The Peter L. O’Neill Memorial Fund.
